A Report On Subtitle Translation In The Talented Mr. Ripley

With the increasing introduction of English films into Chinese market, the English-Chinese subtitle translation is becoming a thriving area of translation in China. The subtitle translation plays an important role in solving the problems raised by language obstacles in cultural communication. Nevertheless, due to the complexity of the source text itself and the difficulty in choosing the appropriate strategies, subtitle translation hasn’t made great progress in China. Meanwhile, the main characteristics of the subtitle translation are synthetic and transient, and parts of the important information fail to supply with their annotations, which bring extreme challenges for translators.In this project, the author translates the source text that is excerpted from the script of a famous film named The Talented Mr. Ripley, describes the translation procedures, and provides the typical case analyses. Before the process of subtitling, the author firstly analyses the project, formulates the translation strategies and methods, and searches for parallel texts. The author combines literal translation with free translation to guarantee the cohesion and coherence of the translated text. During the translation, the author also uses the accessibility tools. Quality control and proofreading are included in the post-translation. After the translation, the author provides the typical case analyses at lexical, syntactic and textual levels, and generalizes the solutions for the problems in the practice. The translation methods mainly include amplification, omission, combination and conversion in sentence patterns. At last, the report presents the conclusion, which includes the findings, deficiencies and expectations during the practice.This report focuses on the subtitle translation, and the significance could be found at three levels. At the theoretical level, subtitle translation study might help the theoretical researchers to formulate the systemic theories and strategies to guide the English-Chinese subtitle translation in China. At the practice level, it might guide the translators to produce the high quality translations. Furthermore, at the cultural level, film is a media for international cultural communication, and high quality subtitle translation could assist Chinese audience to understand the different cultures. As a result, improving the quality of English-Chinese subtitle translation could promote the introduction of good films into China, thereby, improving the development of Chinese films and enhancing cultural communications between Chinese and foreign film industry.